I started having sympathy and went, "awww," and that thought linked to a scene that happened around the corner a week a go when I described a similar botanical plotz, except mine was the opposite, dried out, went limp, and I showed that with my hands, a plastic basket of flowers gone limp from a single day of neglect, and only recovering partially, and neglected again as I work out the watering scheme, and gone limp again, so the hands droop twice, "and a couple of those episodes..."

Certainly not Obama, who given all the problems facing America, today made a big address on climate change. Never mind that temperatures have been flat since 1998 and even some of the climate faithful are beginning to question whether the alarmists have it right.

Because ultimately it's not about the science.

I once heard a radio show where the speaker addressed an environmentalist audience and said, "Imagine I'm the carbon fairy. With one wave of my magic wand I can neutralize the climate effects of carbon forever. But remember that means people can buy bigger cars, drive more miles, etc. etc. Do you still want me to wave my wand?"

Only two people out of two hundred waved their hands.

No, this is about the leftist-green utopia these people want and will enforce upon the rest of us because they know best.

I'd rather have all this rain than drought, the green is so lush and beautiful this year, last year's brown arid look was depressing. Mosquitoes be damned.

Seems like the older I get, the less interested the mosquitoes are in my blood. When we're camping, they seem to have a strong preference for my kids. I'd take a bullet for my kids, but they're going to have to deal with the bugs themselves.

Certainly not Obama, who given all the problems facing America, today made a big address on climate change. Never mind that temperatures have been flat since 1998 and even some of the climate faithful are beginning to question whether the alarmists have it right.

Dear Professor, do you believe that minority students are unable to compete for admission without special "holistic" policy considerations? I have asked the same of President Bill Powers, of my alma mater, the University of Texas. I suspect I will not get a straight answer.

Yeah, Wendy Davis has emerged as a somewhat surprising figure. I confess I didn't expect this much resistance from citizens, let alone from politicians. Either way, it ensures this nonsense will not be quietly implemented.

Why no exception for rape and incest? More people would go along with the 20 week limitation if there were exceptions for rape and incest. Yes, I'm sure some women will lie, but there will also be those who don't, like 12 year olds who don't know they are pregnant until after 20 weeks, by their father perhaps. How can we expect a child to carry her rapist's baby?

Give the clinics a chance to upgrade their centers to be safer, make sure the centers are inspected.

Why no exception for rape and incest? More people would go along with the 20 week limitation if there were exceptions for rape and incest. Yes, I'm sure some women will lie, but there will also be those who don't, like 12 year olds who don't know they are pregnant until after 20 weeks, by their father perhaps.

Boy, there's a justification right out of NOW, I betcha. Strikes right at the heart of that terrible old patriarchy.

But since the She Devil brings it up, I wonder how many phony rapes, etc., are used to justify abortions?

How can we expect a child to carry her rapist's baby?

You mean like it's never happened before in the annals of recorded history, so the innocent kid could be given up for adoption?

Like, never?

Truth in advertising: I have no problem with the whole trapdoor for legitimate cases of rape and incest, but I have this funny feeling this provision was brought about by some heavy defalcatin'.

Because a rape/incest exception makes no sense from either the pro-life or pro-choice position. If the fetus has rights, why does it lose them because of who its father was? We don't believe in blood guilt in this country.

And if the fetus doesn't have rights, well, aborting it is fine no matter who its father is.

Yes, I'm sure some women will lie, but there will also be those who don't, like 12 year olds who don't know they are pregnant until after 20 weeks, by their father perhaps.

What an odd world we would live in if the political left applied this level of concern to the laws they champion.

You never hear a left-winger bemoaning the people whose businesses go belly-up because of misguided regulations, for example. You always get some variation on "can't make an omelet without breaking eggs" when it comes to regulations... unless the thing being regulated is abortion. Then all you hear about is the 0.01% of abortions performed on underage late-term incest victims. :)

And yes, I do realize the hypocrisy goes both ways. Most people think regulation is great when it can be used to club their political enemies.

"Why no exception for rape and incest? More people would go along with the 20 week limitation if there were exceptions for rape and incest. Yes, I'm sure some women will lie, but there will also be those who don't, like 12 year olds who don't know they are pregnant until after 20 weeks, by their father perhaps. How can we expect a child to carry her rapist's baby?"

Shouldn't the rape victim be most likely to get the abortion quickly? Now that morning after pills will be available to all without a prescription, isn't the late-term rape-victim abortion quite remote?

Maybe an exception for an underaged person, but I would want to see the father arrested and prosecuted.

"Maybe an exception for an underaged person, but I would want to see the father arrested and prosecuted."

6/25/13, 6:02 PM

Yes chances are the rape victim may know she's pregnant early on, my concern is for the young girl already sexually abused, confused, ignorant, scared. Definitely an exception for underage girls, along with arrest and prosecution of the father.

Again the baby is innocent. As for the Texas exception I don't know about it, but yes a handicapped baby has a right to life as much as any baby. The only exception I can see is if having the child will likely kill the mother. Then it's like self defense.

It's interesting that Roe skips over the two traumatic, emotional issues in the case--infanticide and rape. And of course those are the two issues that really upset the American people. That is what we shout about the most. So the unresolved feeling we get about abortion stems from the Court's unwillingness to talk openly about what is at stake.

Jane Roe was alleging that she was raped (a false claim!). Texas had no exception for rape. So that would have been a good basis for overturning the statute on narrow grounds.

For instance, the Court could have easily found a right to emergency birth control for rape victims under Griswold.

Indeed, the attorneys for Texas argued that the baby's life began at implantation (not conception) because they did not want to run afoul of Griswold.

Also, Texas claimed the purpose of the law was the protect the baby's life. Yet the Supreme Court found Texas was dehumanizing the baby (for instance, by not classifying abortion as murder, and by not punishing the aborting woman as an accomplice).

Why not overrule the statute and send it back to Texas for the state to bring its abortion, death, and homicide statutes into alignment? You could do that on due process grounds, since it's unclear whether an abortionist could be prosecuted for murder or for abortion.

Really, really hard finding common ground between the pro-life and pro-choice positions. Laurence Tribe wrote a book, The Clash of Absolutes about the fight. But his "solution" was for pro-life people to give up!

my concern is for the young girl already sexually abused, confused, ignorant, scared.

Congrats on feeling sympathy for the two or three incest victims that seek late-term abortions in Texas each year. You've taken your first mincing step on the road to recognizing that individual liberty is the most important thing there is. :)

St Croix: I'm not interested in registering for free to read, but here's a passage from Richard Posner's book on Public Intellectuals, where he describes books by Gould and Tribe and mentions the McConnell review of Tribe.

Gould's book illustrates the style of public-intellectual work that might be called "splitting the difference" or "above the fray," in which a partisan of one side of a hotly debated topic professes to be navigating a middle course between extremes that he disparages for their extremism, but in fact he gives all the good arguments to his own (undisclosed) side.

The prominent law professor and public intellectual Laurence Tribe wrote a book on abortion purporting (as its subtitle suggests) to find a middle way between the pros and the antis, but in fact coming down hard in favor of the pros.

A review by Michael McConnell pointed out that "Professor Tribe is too little informed about the ethical, scientific, and legal arguments of opponents of abortion to be able to explain them, too unacquainted with pro-life people to understand their motivations or address their concerns, too committed to his own perspective to see things through the eyes of the other side, and too much a lawyer to put aside, even for a moment, the opportunity to argue his case.";)

Ogletree never imagined that his student would become the first African-American in the Oval Office. "My assessment was ... that he was going to be the best damn mayor that we've ever seen in history."

Obama recently joked about that assessment with his old friend and mentor, asking, "Man, why did you downgrade me?"

One of the cases the Supreme Court relied upon in Roe to dehumanize the baby was a California case, Keeler v. Superior Court.

It's a criminal case in regard to whether a man could be charged with murder for killing an unborn baby. The defendant attacked his ex-wife, stomping her in the belly with the intention of killing her child. She was very late in the term. The baby, five pounds, was dead upon delivery.

The man was prosecuted and convicted of murder. But the Supreme Court of California overruled the conviction, finding that a unborn baby was a legal non-person, and cannot be murdered.

There was an outcry in California, and the murder statutes were amended.

The case is horrific. The people of California are upset that this baby is murdered and the killer goes free. And they change the law to recognize the humanity of unborn children.

And yet our United States Supreme Court ignores how upset the people of California are by this case. It ignores how the people changed the law to protect unborn babies from murder. It ignores the facts of the case.

In a way I think Supreme Court Justices are the worst people to "resolve" our abortion dispute. All of them are trained attorneys and think in a very detached way. But this detachment can be dangerous, particularly as you are defining who is a person and who is not one. Clearly the Court feels nothing for this baby who was brutally murdered. But the people of California, what did they say?

The popular upset at the infanticides of Roe was predictable from the very beginning. Citing and relying upon Keeler was stupid.